Losing ground: barely making a dent

In 1989, after almost two decades of inaction, Louisiana finally began to address what had become the mortal threat of coastal land loss.

Voters approved a constitutional amendment that set aside oil revenue to rebuild wetlands, and the Legislature reconfigured state agencies for the task. The Gulf of Mexico had consumed about a third of the state's coastal wetlands since the 1930s -- more than 2,000 square miles -- but the tide would soon turn, experts and politicians said.

Story by

Bob Marshall

- and -

Mark Schleifstein
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

It never did.

Almost two decades and more than $1 billion later, the Gulf has eaten at least an additional 456 square miles of the state's coast, an area almost as large as Los Angeles. Meanwhile, meager restoration efforts have reclaimed or stabilized only about 95 square miles of wetlands. Experts now say Louisiana has only about a decade left to change that equation or the Gulf could be lapping at New Orleans' suburbs.

"I hate to use the word 'failure,' " said Mark Schexnayder, who has been involved in coastal restoration for 20 years, lately as a regional coastal adviser with Louisiana State University's Sea Grant College Program. "But . . . obviously, we're losing the war."

The tale of that failure, experts say, is a tragedy in four chapters:

-- a belated commitment of the state's full energy to the effort

-- warring economic interests that have used political power to block coast-saving projects that threatened their bottom lines

-- federal administrations that have never given more than lip service to the cause

-- and a Byzantine, years-long federal approval process that all but guarantees a project is outdated before it can be completed.

"When the state and the (Army Corps of Engineers) finally got serious about doing something, we established all sorts of programs for designing plans to address the problem. But it was never anybody's business to ensure any of these plans were implemented," said Mark Davis, a Tulane Law School professor who was executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana from 1991 to 2006. "It was always assumed that somehow, some way that would all just happen."

Feeding off the coast

Louisiana and the nation have known since the 1960s that the state's coastal estuaries -- the largest and most productive fishing grounds in the continental United States -- were turning into open water. And they knew the core causes: the taming of the Mississippi River for flood control and shipping and the dredging of canals for oil and gas.

The government built levees to protect communities from Mississippi River floods. It built jetties at the river's mouth to prevent sandbars from forming and blocking shipping traffic. Those projects worked, but they also accelerated land loss by cutting off sediment flow to the wetlands that once kept pace with subsidence, the natural sinking of soft marsh soils.

Still, the Louisiana coast might have survived another 1,000 years or more, Louisiana State University scientists said. But the discovery of oil and gas compressed its destruction into a half-century.

By the 1980s, the petroleum industry and the corps had dredged more than 20,000 miles of canals and new navigation channels from the coast inland across the wetlands. The new web of waterways, like a circulatory system pumping poison, injected saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico into salt-sensitive freshwater wetlands. Fueled by the advance of big business on the coast, the Gulf's slow march northward accelerated into a sprint.

Scientists started sounding alarms in the 1970s, warning of dire human and economic consequences. But the call for action gained little traction -- even in coastal Louisiana -- outside of environmental and scientific circles.

"The problem was happening out there well beyond the levees, in places most people, other than fishermen and hunters, never saw," said Kerry St. Pe, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, which is charged with developing a plan to address erosion in that area of the coast.

That started changing in 1989, with the establishment of a state trust fund for coastal restoration financed by oil leases.

The next year, Louisiana's U.S. senators, John Breaux and J. Bennett Johnston, steered the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act through Congress. The Breaux Act, as it is now known, today provides about $70 million a year in federal and state money for small "demonstration projects" meant to test solutions and prove to Congress that investing vastly more money would work.

Critically, the legislation also required the development of a far more comprehensive master plan for restoring Louisiana's fabric of barrier islands, headlands and rich interior wetlands. Meanwhile, the corps was designing and constructing larger projects, such as the Caernarvon and Davis Pond freshwater diversions, that allow river water to push saltwater out of receding wetlands and begin recoating them with silt.

As the 1990s began, coastal activists felt they had reached a turning point.

It soon became apparent that was an illusion.

Talking loud, doing nothing

Louisiana had an image problem. Its message seemed to be: Do as I say, not as I do.

At the same time the state's congressional delegation begged for money to protect the coast, its members had joined the anti-regulation movement Republicans brought to Washington when they took control of Congress in 1994. And so they supported efforts to soften regulations protecting wetlands from industrial damage and a drive to require financial compensation to property owners facing wetlands restrictions, which inflated the potential cost of restoration projects.

"At the same time we were asking for help in protecting our wetlands, (the Louisiana delegation) was pushing for reducing regulations and protections," Davis said. "It was all to help the oil industry. People on the national level just couldn't take us seriously."

In one of many examples, former U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin in 2000 pushed a bill through the House offering landowners compensation if environmental regulations lowered their property values. It didn't pass the Senate, but all but one of the state's delegation voted for the measure.

Most of the delegation have also supported a variety of drilling incentives for the oil and gas industry in the past decade, spurring activity that further ate into the wetlands. Industry officials counter that the drilling provisions boosted the economy of Louisiana and the nation , and that a variety of oil and gas companies now support the state's coastal restoration efforts, both politically and by cooperating with individual projects.

Meanwhile, the Breaux Act was proving a mixed blessing. While it provided a small pot of desperately needed money, it contained the seeds of two vexing problems: It created new bureaucracies that slowed progress and channeled focus and financing to small projects, a strategy akin to a Band-Aid on a jugular wound.

The new super-bureaucracy gave five federal agencies roles in every project: the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Interior, Commerce and Agriculture. And the new power to adopt smaller, individual projects in coastal parishes created a clamor of competition among parish governments, landowners, contractors and the federal agencies for the scarce dollars available under the Breaux Act.

During the program's first eight years, dozens of projects were approved, only to be abandoned later after critics questioned their goals, cost estimates and purported benefits.

In other cases, owners of land needed for the projects objected. For instance, a plan to restore marshlands in St. Tammany Parish, next to the Eden Isles subdivision, was stymied by a new landowner who wanted to use the property to expand the subdivision. Another project, to build a crevasse in the bank of the Mississippi River near Pass a Loutre, was abandoned when the price of relocating underground utilities in the area proved too expensive.

Meanwhile, work on the promised master plan lagged. By the mid-1990s, a number of local, federal and state players in the Breaux Act system began questioning the focus on small projects. They also pushed for completion of a master plan that would bring focus to the areas with the worst erosion problems instead of clinging to the politically safe practice of evenly distributing projects along the coastline.

But another, more intransigent impediment stood in the way of big-picture planning: the very people the projects were meant to save. The bold strokes that so many had recommended would prove mostly talk, because larger projects affect more people and business interests and stirred up more opposition, said Robert Twilley, an LSU biology professor who has spearheaded computer modeling for the federal-state Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Plan.

"There is a great lobby for keeping things the way they are," Twilley said. "We are addicted to the way we have come to use the system. . . . So those bold strokes were never taken."

Power of self-interest

Coastal advocates knew what the massive problem demanded: Engineers needed to redirect fresh water and sediment from the Mississippi River back into the dying marshes.

That meant building massive river diversions. But each diversion required the cooperation of powerful interest groups, including fishers, oil and gas companies, landowners and developers. More to the point, it required them to sacrifice their self-interest.

In one example, the installation of the first large freshwater diversions at Caernarvon and Davis Pond stirred strident objection from the fishing industry. The mix of wetlands along the coast range from shoreline saltwater to less-salty brackish water, where oysters grow, to freshwater marshes farther north.

The diversions were designed to push the saltwater line miles to the south in hopes of saving or rebuilding large swaths of fresh and brackish marsh. Fishers rely on the current location of fresh and saltwater to target fish, shrimp or oysters, and changing the flow of water into a wetland area could change the list of seafood species found there. Some fishers could be forced out of business; others might see a bonanza.

Though no fisher would object to the larger goal of coastal restoration, those who got hit in the wallet decried those projects -- and reacted even more fiercely to proposals for larger diversions that might further dislocate them from their fishing grounds.

"Everyone agrees you need to break eggs to make an omelet, but no one wants their eggs to be the ones broken," Davis said. "Now we're well past the point where we can make everyone happy."

Another huge hurdle for planners lay in the sanctity of private property rights, which the state's congressional delegation vociferously supported. More than 80 percent of the state's coastal wetlands are privately held, so landowners had to agree to the changes caused by the restoration projects, or accept financial compensation.

The landowners also included the petrochemical industry, which sought to protect thousands of miles of pipelines and service canals running through the wetlands. Dumping new sediment into that network could close off canals, restricting access.

Real estate developers, with a stake in providing land for industries as well as residential and recreational owners, also had a vested interest in saving the coast -- but they wanted the coast-saving diversions to be installed where it wouldn't hurt their bottom line.

Appeasing all such interest groups became a Sisyphean task for federal and state officials, threatening to kill any momentum pushing restoration plans forward, and potentially running up the costs.

The right to erosion

Since larger projects affected more people, as the scope of a plan and its potential for building land grew, so did the opposition.

The most stunning example came in 2002 when oyster fishers won a multibillion-dollar judgment against the state after convincing a state judge that freshwater diversion projects ruined their oyster grounds, which were located on leases of state-owned water bottoms.

Though that ruling was overturned by the Louisiana Supreme Court two years later, the long legal fight resulted in a huge expenditure of time and money that diverted attention from the common goal of restoring the coastline.

Pleasing other powerful groups proved just as challenging.

No one knows better than St. Pe. The congressionally mandated mission statement of the national estuary program he manages includes a charge to "develop a coalition of government, private and commercial interests for the preservation of the Barataria and Terrebonne basins."

St. Pe, who grew up in Port Sulphur near the mouth of the river, said he spent most of the past 15 years attending to concerns of the various lobbies. While sympathetic to residents attempting to preserve their way of life -- from oyster harvesters and citrus growers to oil workers -- St. Pe soon realized that without consensus they all were going to be losers.

But that didn't stop the obstructionism. If just one group objected loudly enough, nothing got done, he said.

"They call their politicians, and they stopped it repeatedly," St. Pe said. "Look, there's no politician that will decide that we are going to do something in the name of restoration that will wipe out an entire way of life."

That point was driven home again late last year when St. Pe showed the Plaquemines Parish Chamber of Commerce a proposal for a large sediment diversion project at Myrtle Grove. The community lies between Belle Chasse and Port Sulphur, in the heart of wetlands undergoing the highest erosion rate in the state. Yet among representatives of the local petrochemical, citrus, tourism and fishing industries, the reaction to St. Pe's initiatives was unanimous: No.

Despite this tendency, federal and state officials had by 1998 successfully revamped the Breaux Act selection process and completed the long-awaited restoration master plan, called Coast 2050. The wide-ranging treatise outlined a variety of long-term restoration techniques and projects -- and its name implied that the problem could be solved slowly over a half century.

Yet almost a decade later, not one of the ambitious projects has made it off the shelf, and the Gulf of Mexico has closed in on population centers far faster than coastal scientists feared.

Even quick agreement on the local level might not have made much difference, however. The concerns felt in south Louisiana, it turns out, simply did not resonate in Washington.

Political sleight of hand

By 2000, state and corps planners had begun to turn Coast 2050 into a detailed 30-year, $14 billion blueprint called the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Plan.

After polishing the plan for another two years at Washington's behest, in 2002 the state and corps officials presented their effort to the Bush administration -- and ran into a brick wall.

The administration's Office of Management and Budget ordered the plan downsized to include only the first 10 years of projects, drastically cutting the price tag to between $1.2 billion and $1.9 billion. The reduction stemmed from unprecedented budget deficits spurred by a wave of tax cuts and the invasion of Iraq. The White House Council on Environmental Quality also weighed in, saying the larger projects weren't backed by solid science.

The slap-down stunned state officials. But Mark Davis, a veteran of federal lobbying efforts, was not surprised. Successive presidential administrations have paid lip service to restoration plans, only to turn around and impose policies they knew to be the kiss of death. He recalled congressional committee chairmen telling him bluntly that drawing up the reports was a waste of time -- budget caps meant Congress could never finance them.

After the rejection, corps and state officials returned to cherry-picking the master plan's projects, none of which, on its own, could stop the Gulf's march toward New Orleans and its suburbs.

Set up to fail

Even the pared-back approach has lain dormant since 2004. It has been the victim of major battles in Congress that experts say highlight another overriding reason the Gulf continues to march unchecked through coastal Louisiana: the Water Resources Development Act.

Public works projects dealing with water -- such as reservoirs, shipping channels and flood control -- have long been among the most lucrative a lawmaker could bring home. And so in any given year, nearly all of the 535 members fight for a slice of the pie. That kind of interest would create a logjam even in a simple, lightning-quick approval process. But the maze that is the Water Resources Development Act slows progress to a glacial pace.

In a convoluted process, restoration projects proposed by a local sponsor must undergo a series of studies of their economic and ecological benefits and detriments. Congress must approve the studies, which can take three to five years. Then, in a separate process, the corps must seek money in its annual budget to conduct them.

Once completed, the studies pass through three more levels of review and approval -- by the chief of the corps, the assistant secretary of the Army for public works, and the White House's Office of Management and Budget and Council for Environmental Quality -- before their recommendations make it back to Congress. Congress then must put the project in the water resources bill, which hardly guarantees its approval.

If a project clears all of the hurdles without a hitch, it still takes another six to 10 years before construction begins. In the worst-case scenario -- the typical one for coastal restoration projects -- projects can be held in limbo for decades.

And even that torturous process has been paralyzed since 2000, the last year Congress approved a water resources bill. Last year, the more than 650 projects included in the Water Resources Development Act failed to pass amid congressional squabbling in the waning hours of the 109th Congress. And hundreds of water projects approved in previous versions still await congressional financing.

Louisiana's current coastal plan -- including five projects that would cost $1.2 billion and a speeded-up planning process for 10 more projects worth $700 million -- must compete with a half-dozen major environmental restoration projects still awaiting approval, many of them vital, multibillion-dollar projects with powerful constituencies from other states.

Critics both in and out of Congress have worked to block approval of more projects until Congress reconsiders the entire broken process, from the corps all the way to Capitol Hill. In 2006, Congress ordered the corps to conduct a study of ways to "fix" the water bill problems, leaving the state's projects, ironically, paralyzed because of a needed good-government reform effort that could last years.

Meanwhile, state officials and environmental groups, concerned that Louisiana's coastline could further erode during that transition, are now calling for congressional approval of the restoration plan outside the traditional water bill process.

"The state is constantly told by Congress, 'Where's your plan? You have to set priorities,' " Coffee said. "Well, we have to turn back to Congress and say: 'So do you. You have to be brave enough to make these decisions and decide what projects go first.' We all have to make a national investment in what's important."